7. Playing Is Not Consenting: Sexual Harassment in New York Theatre

Based on field research conducted in 2015 and 2017 in New York, before and during the reverberations of the ‘Weinstein affair’, I use a political-sociological lens to show that the sexual harassment that occurs in the theatre world is anchored in established ways of working. The methodological approach adopted—i.e., the collection of life stories with twenty-eight female theatre professionals, including repeat interviews with some of them over several years—allowed to build a rapport of trust and encouraged the verbalisation of experiences of sexual harassment. Framed as a form of employment discrimination on the basis of sex, the legal structuring of sexual harassment poses certain challenges where theatrical activity is concerned. Indeed, exposing and denouncing sexual harassment are all the more hindered by the fact that in the theatre world, the body is not only a work tool, but also the medium of interactions that involve gender relations in their physical intimacy. There are, however, a range of strategies in place to navigate these practices, targeting both the emergence of sexual harassment and the fabric of its underlying power relations.